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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936182275 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Schaffner Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Acid Christ
Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy
By Mark Christensen
Schaffner Press
Copyright © 2010 Mark ChristensenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936182-08-4
CHAPTER 1
REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT
"Once upon a time a young man of American background thought he had discovered the great Secret, the Skeleton Key to the Cosmos, the Absolute Answer to the Age-Old Question asked by every Wizard and Alchemist and Mystic that ever peered curiously into the Perplexity heavens, by every Doctor and Scientist and Explorer that ever wondered about the Winding Ways of the world, by every Philosopher and Holy man and Politician that ever listened for the Mysterious Song beneath the beat of the Human Heart ... the answer to 'What Makes It All Go?'"
— Ken Kesey
Portland, Oregon 2003.
Death's door. Here's what can happen if, after a breakfast beer or two or three, you're not careful at a cross walk: multiple concussions, two broken shoulders, a broken neck, several broken ribs, both legs shattered below the knees. This was just days after my ex-cousin, poet Marty Christensen, had taken part in a eulogy to Ken Kesey. Marty — small, handsome, grizzled, quick — evoking the riches to rags élan of a broke blueblood down on his luck — as author of the following tribute to the man he referred to simply as the Commander.
THE SHAMAN
There is a strange boom
when he explodes
we go up
& remain aloft
he gestures from below
we feel calm
& flap our arms
But do not dare to bend over.
Marty and his beloved, tall, pretty, sad-eyed Lorna, lived in East Portland in a little house that featured plants cut to animal shapes in front, all Marty's stuff inside — dunes of tapes and books all over the livingroom floor — and the "Hole to Nowhere" out back, a hole the blackest of black which appeared totally bottomless. You could drop a beer bottle down there, send it on its way straight to hell or China, and never hear it hit bottom. Marty was the kind of off-center voice Oregon grows or hosts best: in-through-the-out-door talents including Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, Katherine Dunn, Kent Anderson, Mikal Gilmore, Susan Orlean, Gus Van Sant, Larry Colton, John Shirley, Pierre Ouellette, Todd Grimson, Charles D'Ambrosio, Rick Steber and Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel Fight Club made him — for Gen X, Y or Z — the kind of New Normal Noir freak beacon Kesey had been for Flower Children.
The state has played home or host to bohemian writers going back to John Reed, "the father of modern journalism," who was born in Portland before writing the story of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and dying of typhus at 31. A pioneer Marxist all about free love and anarchy, Reed, not Kesey, was arguably the true First Hippie. Oregon also abides more linear types. Bill Keller, current Executive Editor of The New York Times, was a reporter here for years. Low on oligarchs and movie stars (a young Clark Gable lived in Portland, did dinner theater, and moved south), killers and writers have long found Oregon a comfy windowed womb, and Ken Kesey, blessed with brilliant parents, was very much a product of this environment.
A man of the West —"homeland of the rootless" as Kesey's editor Malcolm Cowley called it — a still somewhat unsettled land recalling wilderness and fantasy, both the wild and the imaginary, from Paul Bunyan to Bigfoot, home to free spirits like DB Cooper, Gary Gilmore, Tonya Harding, Courtney Love and maybe the most successfully subversive modern American of all, Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons." As perhaps the most culturally complex of the northwestern states (though whitebread whack Norman Rockwell Nazi Idaho certainly gives it a run for its money and the Tom McGuane borough of Montana is not chopped liver either), Oregon is a fractured fairy tale, not one state, but several, home to cops who drive Volvos, liberals who hate blacks and bikers who vote Republican. Where put enough lead in the air and you're bound to come home happy, any man could shoot a duck for dinner, and where local Ishmaels fish for thirty pound steelhead on ten-pound test.
Marty had first met Kesey at a poetry reading across town at "Fool's Paradise" in Portland in 1972. Kesey came into the tavern with Prankster second-in-command Ken Babbs. They set up an applause-o-meter in the back of the gloomy beer mill as Marty was reading from a portfolio of poems including:
LASTING HATE
When I was a lad I'd roam
sewers in search of animals
which I would kill then try
to sell for money.
I hated them then and I still
feel nothing but complete contempt.
Of all the poets performing that night, Marty got the highest score on the Prankster applause-o-meter. Kesey was so impressed he named Marty head of the Portland delegation to "Bend in the River," Kesey's national symposium designed to determine the hippie/utopian/Keseyian future of the Republic.
"Auxiliary" Prankster Marty was one of Kesey's favorites perhaps because nuthouse alum Marty had lived the zero gravity life Kesey had only dreamt about, and because Marty gave Kesey shit. Claiming, for example, "Ken, contrary to your own opinions, do you realize that most people locked up in insane asylums are actually out of their minds? It sounds crazy, but it's true." Kesey got a kick out of that and, after all, Marty should know. Locked up at twenty-two for expressing too many "opinions" in front of a judge after a drunk and disorderly charge, Marty — like Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest anti-hero Randle P. McMurphy — parlayed a soft spot for hospital food and Demerol into a "Ward Leader" position at the state mental institution in Salem. In 1976, when Norman Mailer dropped out of Kesey's "Poetic Hoo-Haw" arts festival in Eugene because of a perceived anti-Semitic slight to his (Mailer's) son, Kesey scratched out Mailer's name in the marquee and scrawled in Marty's, commenting with a shrug, "Same thing."
Pretty much, Marty had lived a charmed life. But, as Kesey had long been fond of saying, "nothing lasts." Two weeks after reading poems at the Bagdad Theater, he and Lorna got up, drank a beer, and drove to the "Mouse Trap" tavern, where Marty drank more beer until the afternoon when Lorna came to fetch him. Marty wanted cigarettes and Lorna crossed the street to go to a liquor store. Marty was following behind when he was struck by a car and knocked twenty feet through the air.
He lay bleeding on the street until the ambulance arrived, bones broken from head to toe, and then began to go into seizures.
* * *
A Christ figure who quit his day job as the new Norman Mailer to deliver millennial baby boomers the psychedelic New Jerusalem, Ken Kesey's super hero career began with the biggest bang ever. Not even Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer or John Updike had, by age 28, enjoyed the double-whammy of two literary and commercial smash hit novels — only to then ditch literature to rescue mankind, hoping to "stop the coming end of the world."
"The Chief" was an archetypical American Fair-haired Boy (subspecies Son of the West) madman for all seasons, as profoundly American as John Wayne, Hugh Hefner, Sonny Barger or Britney Spears. Writer, artist (Kesey's illustrated jailhouse journal reveals a master of caricature), Olympic class (almost) athlete, musician (his frog voiced "Jimmy Crack Corn" ranks with, if not "White Rabbit," at least "Double Shot of My Baby's Love"), lady's man, magician, thespian, friend to those who had no friends, social architect, jail bird, original hippie cum great white father, the Great Truth Teller as consummate bullshit artist, he was that rare soul who had a talent for everything.
And as representative of an all-American ideal, the dream of unlimited success and total lack of restraint, Kesey remains hard to beat, and through his "freak freely" ministry great ideas flew from his head like illuminated dandruff. A writer who declared the novel was yesterday's paper and abandoned literature to create "the Art of I," starring himself as Pied Piper on the Seeker's New Path, he was an actor looking beyond the footlights to his base: the flower-haired seekers in the cheap seats. In a stunning new take on the old Hollywood saw, "But what I really want to do is direct," Kesey abandoned "archaic" prose to spend nearly every dollar he'd earned from his best-selling, culture-changing novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, by shooting thirty reels of 16 millimeter film, recording the bohemian pranking of pure, government-inspected Sandoz LSD-25 acid-blasted, ex-college kids.
His famously unfinished capital M Movie was an epic tale of levitating hipsters on the road — the Kesey-invented Merry Pranksters, proto-hippie/neo-beats who, in tattered preppie dress, recalled body doubles off a Kingston Trio album cover. The Movie documented Kesey's soon-to-be famous 1964 bus trip, which served as a sort of New Testament for his LSD ministry — a trip that would have likely been a lot less "famous" if not chronicled by Tom Wolfe, but a movie which could have been a smash.
Doubt it? Witness the early documentary sensation, Endless Summer: In Search of the Perfect Wave filmed by Bruce Brown at about the same time, that reflected similar utopian themes (substitute acid for surfing). Had Kesey and his band of Stanford grads possessed the ability to match the recorded sound to the recorded film they shot (the single technical glitch that tunneled the Movie), Kesey might have become a sort of 21st century psychedelic Socrates.
Yet, courtesy Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey became nevertheless a walking, talking, heaven-hawking, Technicolor catalyst who jumped from the page to change our culture. In Kesey's wake Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson became the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the Love Generation, (with Charlie Manson later on taking a star turn as Satan Lite) whose sudden, huge young audience waited with baited breath for them to write the new social and psychedelic testament.
Kesey's Kesey trumped Mailer's Aquarius (for one thing, Ken had that posse. The Pranksters became Kesey's beloved Beta house fraternity on wheels, the fraternity became the tribe — if not the Apostles). A Boho Robin Hood whose clubby sensibilities were expressed by his watch words: "You're either on the bus or off the bus," Kesey resembled a leader of a political party whose platform was party, party, party. He lived to get higher than high, take his mind to karmic Everest. Why? Perhaps, to paraphrase mountaineer George Mallory — because it was there.
In the pre-metro-sexual, pre-Masters of the Universe universe, farmbred wrestler/magician (he was able, among many other fitting illusions, to make his wedding band levitate weightless above his dining room table) Kesey — shepherd to a Woodstock Nation of sheep — became an American icon, at least briefly, almost equal to the Marlboro Man. A master of product placement, a commercial for a more ethereal leaf.
A metaphysical monster of the midway, a man of near limitless abilities and startling limitations, Kesey was Pied Piper for a generation for whom the willing suspension of disbelief was key to the Holy Grail. Golden Boy writ writer, "wildly gregarious," Kesey, with the build, as Cowley said, "of a plunging fullback" and the hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie of a literary Mad Man Muntz, posed an appropriate and puzzling Messiah for a generation that went from saving the world to selling it; from bongs to BMWs, in far less time than it took to go from "All You Need is Love" to "Cheeseburger in Paradise."
Kesey was, among many other things, big on symbols, one of the first to take the American flag off its staff and really fuck with it. The new edicts and gospels and megalomanias were born not to stone tablets and mountaintops but TV screens and electric guitars. The acid prophets Kesey and Leary — preached not commandments as much as permission, the promise of Aquarius Now delivered by forces powerful, wise and, above all, unseen.
"I never knew anyone in my life," novelist Robert Stone marveled, "before or since, who was a dreamer on that scale, who really believed in Possibility, the great American bugbear Possibility, to the degree that Kesey did. I never knew anyone who had his ability to communicate that sense of possibility."
While first painted as a radical, the collective portrait of Kesey amounts to pastel idolatry. Though he dedicated a good part of his life to drugs, romanticized their use with terrible effectiveness, and ultimately died because of them, in most popular portraits of Kesey he appears as a gentle giant, and at worst the high priest of a failed religion.
Many details of Kesey's past have been lost to legend or convenience.
And too, his books are often oddly misremembered. Cuckoo, whose surreal narrative is often credited as psychedelia's first great gift to art, has also been dubbed the primer for 1960s anti-authoritarianism, though its hero, roustabout R. P. McMurphy, is about as prototypically hippie-like as John McCain. Sometimes a Great Notion is similarly credited as a totem to free-thinking individualism, though its protagonists are as locked in their "never give an inch" beliefs as the Christian fundamentalist Ken Kesey himself often seemed to mirror.
So why did Kesey's life seem to go so far downhill after those two novels?
It was certainly not for want of energy or ambition. No tendril-armed bi-focalist laboring in a cobwebbed garret, burly Kesey was the big man on campus writ artiste, acidhead alpha dog and action figure, an aging high school jock in flower power drag — and he was not particularly a free thinker, taking his cues not from proto-hippies Rousseau, Heathcliff or Walt Whitman but from his childhood comic book heroes, Superman, Spiderman, Plasticman, Batman, and Captain Marvel. But, fly as they might, comic book super heroes aren't free spirits. They are cops.
Kesey's novels were often populated by errant hollering Paul Bunyan manques from a wild west Oregon that most buttoned-down Oregonians barely knew existed: a dystopic realm in which brilliant rural rubes, "bull goose loony" Ayn Rand types in cork boots, ruled a feral mythological roost. But cosmopolitan myth-master and university town homeboy Kesey, who owed as much to Joseph Campbell as he did to William Faulkner, was no Noble Savage. Nor — as a prophet and Great Truth teller rabble rouser — was Kesey a tub-thumping Commie Madonna kneeling at the altar of Karl Marx or Mother Bloor.
A man of many contradictions, Kesey was a walking talking proof that belief as well as beauty could be in the eye of the beholder. People tended to believe in Kesey as whatever they wanted to believe. The Republic's favorite hallucinogenic, generous and lackadaisically self-centered, Houdini of hip, Kesey could write prose as tight or preposterous as the New Testament; yet he also banged out typed-by-the-yard speed rants you could edit with a blow torch. However, there was always vision in the visionary — Kesey's ideas for an interactive "video democracy" were decades before their time. Sadly, though he had a transformative vision that went beyond hippie socialism, as a tribal genius but a corporate naif, he was unable to implement it beyond his Oregon statewide "Bend in the River." As a manifestation of perhaps the greatest idea he ever had — a radical new "people's democracy" created by shifting political power away from politicians to statewide referendums whose merits and shortcomings would be broadcast and debated on television and then voted on by ballots published in statewide newspapers —"Bend in the River" was truly revolutionary. What had gone wrong?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Acid Christ by Mark Christensen. Copyright © 2010 Mark Christensen. Excerpted by permission of Schaffner Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE: NEON RENAISSANCE MAN,PART ONE: THE SHEPHERDS,
Chapter One: Requiem for a Heavyweight,
Chapter Two: Natural Man,
Chapter Three: Adams and Eves,
Chapter Four: BMOC,
Chapter Five: The Good Book,
Chapter Six: Unholy Grail,
Chapter Seven: Big Mother and the Whores,
PART TWO: THE SHEEP,
Chapter Eight: Holy Land,
Chapter Nine: Notion,
Chapter Ten: Theater of Sheep,
Chapter Eleven: I am A Camera,
Chapter Twelve: Auteur,
Chapter Thirteen: Blows Against the Empire,
Chapter Fourteen: Days of Heaven,
PART THREE: THE SAVANT,
Chapter Fifteen: Krassner Agonistes,
Chapter Sixteen: Utopian Thought in the Western World,
Chapter Seventeen: Holy Mayhem, Inc,
Chapter Eighteen: The Jail Interviews,
Chapter Nineteen: Sea Change,
Chapter Twenty: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again, Maybe, of the High Ideal,
Chapter Twenty-One: Fantasy Island,
Chapter Twenty-Two: High Crimes,
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Abuses of Enchantment,
Chapter Twenty-Four: .000001 and Much, Much More,
Chapter Twenty-Five: Man Child in the Promised Land,
Chapter Twenty-Six: Heaven on Earth,
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Burbank Babylon,
PART FOUR: SHEEP, THE SEQUEL,
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Working on My Fantasy,
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Revolution Has Happened,
Chapter Thirty: The Dream Museum,
Chapter Thirty-One: California Girls,
Chapter Thirty-Two: Scepter of Democracy,
PART FIVE: THE SAVED,
Chapter Thirty-Three: The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,
Chapter Thirty-Four: Venusians,
Chapter Thirty-Five: Last Supper,
Chapter Thirty-Six: Dying in the Provinces,
Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Story of H,
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Last Go Round,
Chapter Thirty-Nine: A Long Time Gone,
Chapter Forty: Drowning in the Wishing Well,
Chapter Forty-One: Kiss No Ass,
Chapter Forty-Two: End Game,
Chapter Forty-Three: Stairway to Heaven,
Chapter Forty-Four: Last Rites,
EPILOGUE: FLASHBACKS,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
PUBLISHER'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY,
ENDNOTES,
PHOTO CREDITS,
INDEX,